3-pt Statistics of Cosmological Stochastic Gravitational Waves

Understand

We consider the 3-pt function (i.e.

• the bispectrum or non-Gaussianity) for stochastic backgrounds of gravitational waves.
• We estimate the amplitude of this signal for the primordial inflationary background, gravitational waves generated during preheating, and for gravitational waves produced by self-ordering scalar fields following a global phase transition.
• To assess detectability, we describe how to extract the 3-pt signal from an idealized interferometric experiment and compute the signal to noise ratio as a function of integration time.